J. M. Tyree gets talking about “These Boots Were Made for Walkin’,” the 1966 Nancy Sinatra hit that Stanley Kubrick uses to great effect in his 1987 film, Full Metal Jacket, but that also shows up eerily in the Vietnam documentary The Anderson Platoon in 1966.

“We’ve just witnessed a living nightmare: a Marine recruit, Private Pyle (Vincent D’Onofrio), has murdered his abusive drill instructor (R. Lee Ermey) before turning his rifle on himself on the training grounds at Parris Island. Blood-spattered bathroom tiles, fade to black. And then…Nancy Sinatra?”

Listen to Josh on Laicie Heeley’s podcast, Things That Go Boom, episode 3, which asks “What Happens When the Military Thinks Outside the Box?” Or head over to his essay for more on “These Boots” and Vietnam films.

Along with our colleagues in the Creative Writing Program, NER is pleased to bring nonfiction editor J. M. Tyree to Middlebury. On Thursday, January 26, at 4:30 p.m., Tyree will read in the Axinn Center, Abernethy Room, at Middlebury College. The event is free and open to the public.

Tyree will read from and discuss his new book, Vanishing Streets: Journeys in London, an illustrated travelogue of the peripheries of “the world’s most visited city.” As he wanders through London, Tyree stumbles into the ghosts of Alfred Hitchcock, Graham Greene, the pioneers of the British Free Cinema Movement, and more. This book blends deeply personal writing with a foreigner’s observations on a world capital experiencing an unsettling moment of transition.

Tyree is nonfiction editor of New England Review and a 1995 graduate of Middlebury College. He is coauthor of Our Secret Life in the Movies (with Michael McGriff) and has contributed to Sight & Sound, The Believer, Film Quarterly, and the British Film Institute’s Film Classics series of books. He was a Keasbey Scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge, and a Truman Capote-Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer in Fiction at Stanford University. He currently teaches as Distinguished Visiting Professor at VCUarts.

Kate Petersen, author of the story “After, Before,” speaks with NER nonfiction editor J.M. Tyree about the “modes of the times in which we are living, an envelope of upsetting news convey[ed] through a digital media muddle.” Timing is everything. Read on.

JMT: “After, Before” is a story of great observational intelligence about the ambient moods of the times in which we are living, an envelope of upsetting news conveying through a digital media muddle. It almost has the feel of an essay, but I think it’s important to the story that it self-defines as fiction. Rather than asking you which parts are true and which are made up, could I ask you instead to comment on the artistic reasons regarding why it felt important to write this as a work of fiction?

KP: Well, first, thank you. A short answer is ineptitude; I don’t know what an essay is supposed to do, other than make an attempt. In that sense, I suppose this is a kind of essay. But essays often take on descriptive duties, don’t they? And I was less interested in naming the times some of us are living in than getting under the skin of somebody trying to live in them. And in choosing to draw a mind and body into that “muddle,” it seemed important to me to engage ones apart from my own. Freedom, sure, but also because slipping the limits of one’s own mind and struggling into another’s seems pretty essential to the fictional enterprise. Have I borrowed a broken refrigerator light from a kitchen I have known? Yes. Possibly a bell pepper. But where does knowing that get you? The question dead-ends before it’s asked. On a practical level, I fear writing a nonfiction version of this story would feel like transcription, and boring in the way transcription can be. As a writer, I want to get into unknown territory, and quick. And yet I want some bleed. I want fiction to draft off something in the writer’s own life because I think that’s when there’s skin in the game. Whether it’s an emotional snag, ethical question, or just a room the writer can’t quite get over, that shaded part of the Venn diagram between artist and character has to be there for me as a reader—I have to feel it—and when I don’t, I feel the writer has forgone some vulnerability, and thus some chance to humble themselves before the work. Accordingly, I try to humble myself early and often.

JMT: “Skin in the game”—what a great way to put it. Yes, it seems to me that fiction writers are always being asked to field questions about their own life. That’s fine but it leaves out the element of imagination, doesn’t it?

KP: Right. Fine is such a good word here. I mean, from the reader’s chair, the curiosity is understandable. I know many writers get frustrated with this line of questioning because it isn’t necessarily interesting to us, or because it seems to shortchange whatever imaginative maneuvers we worked so hard to learn, perfect. Fine. But the imaginative apparatus is mysterious, and resists easy articulation (though I’m sure there are a few TED talks out there to suggest otherwise). The problem is probably structural: the question-and-answer is a pedagogical and commercial phenomenon, and when applied to artists, can veer toward justification or explanation (of which biography is a strain). The story, a writer hopes, is self-illumining. If we knew exactly how or why we’d written it, we might not have made the thing at all, worried it as we did.

JMT: Your story strikes me as unconventional in one specific sense, which is its approach to what might normally called “plot.” I found it very liberating to read fiction that followed the shape or rather the shapelessness of life as it’s lived now. Yet there is certainly tension and an unfolding internal journey . . . how did you approach striking that balance?

KP: In his introduction to the Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, Ben Marcus proposes that plot is what a story is hiding, and also the reader’s hide, or body, the space in which the story occurs. This constellatory sense of plot thrills me; to my mind it speaks more closely than a triangle both to fiction’s fueling mystery and its ambition to shape-shift, in moments, into lived life. Maybe having this notion of plot on board permitted the motor of this story to stay submerged, and somatic. “Shapelessness” is such an interesting word here, and I do think the narrative ghost in “After, Before” is struggling with something like that. How ought one orient themself along the world when contact points are so diffuse, mediated, ever-changing, when a primary one has gone missing? What skeleton then pins together a life? What if the things that most demand your attention and grief can be turned off with a button, and never are? I’m answering questions with questions. Bad interview etiquette!

JMT: Not at all. As I see it, this story takes risks on the present and feels very timely, especially in its approach to its use of digital culture as our current method of marking time as we progress through the hours of the day. Do you see this as a fundamental modification of the human condition, or is it all only more of the same, with different external accessories?

KP: I really love that idea, taking a risk on the present! I crave that risk in art, now. Require it even. Perhaps that’s an aspect of my own reading that has changed as I’ve gotten older: I have less patience for the kind of ahistorical three-acts I was given as early models. Were those fictional hearts beating too? Absolutely. But there’s a cleanness to scrubbing a story of its “external accessories,” as you call them, and I’m less and less interested in clean. You’re pickling it for future consumption, in some way, and while I admire the preservative impulse, it tastes different. Surely all art, by virtue of its being set down by the artist and finally let go, is time-stamped. Some works try harder to conceal their stamp than others. I was warned in more than one writing workshop: beware of including technology, music, slang, cultural flotsam, anything that could date your pages, and maybe you were, too. And, of course, you hope the voice you speak with carries down the years. But lately I’ve grown suspicious of such advice, at least when it comes to my own work. Ephemera may last only for a day, a season, but then we’re made of days, aren’t we? As to the second part of your question, the human condition and its trajectory are far above my pay grade. I suspect it’s the latter—just different accessories. But isn’t that question one certain stories are asking us, too: What if this is the very last time it’s like this? What then? What now?

Welcome to “Behind the Byline,” the column in which NER shares conversations with our current writers. Nonfiction editor J. M. Tyree spoke recently with author Emily Geminder about the powerful content and unusual shape of her essay “Phnom Penh 2012” (NER 36.4).

J. M. Tyree: Could we start with some basic facts about what you were doing in Cambodia as a reporter? What drew you into this life?

Emily Geminder: In 2011, I went to work for The Cambodia Daily, a newspaper in Phnom Penh. There were four of us, all women in our mid-twenties, who started together at the paper. That was really the launching point for this essay. We were like any young journalists coming to Cambodia—a little wide-eyed and out of our element. But the fact that we all were women drew a certain amount of attention: speculation about the publisher’s motivations, jokes about the editor who’d hired us. Whereas of course four men coming in at once would be nothing remarkable at all. And then there’d also been this terrible tragedy a few months earlier in which a young woman at the paper had died. Drugs were involved, and three other employees were fired. The four of us heard trickles of this story, but no one talked about it directly, and some of what we heard initially turned out to be completely wrong. I think this added to our sense of being linked to something dark and unsayable and also gendered, a ghost who was always following us. On the one hand, it was a very specific entry into this world but at the same time, a not entirely uncommon one—you can’t work in Cambodia for any length of time and not find yourself thinking a great deal about the undercurrents of history and the strange and uncanny forces they exert on the present. When I got to Phnom Penh, I started taking Khmer lessons from an amazing teacher named Chin Setha, and he and I would go line by line through the Khmer newspapers, which were even more brutal and violent than the English-language ones, so just coming into the language was an initiation into this sense of pervasive violence, particularly violence against women. And at the same time, the trial against the four senior living leaders of the Khmer Rouge had just begun, and there were whispers about why charges like forced marriage and sexual violence had been so slow to be addressed by the prosecution, if at all. There was a sense too that there was a history of violence that was continuous, something unsayable but hovering just below the surface of everyday life.

JMT: When thinking back on these experiences, what made you decide to write about this time in such a lyrical but elliptical way, rather than in the form of a more standard-issue personal essay?

EG: I think the piece really started to take its current shape when I began to hear the voice as plural. Which was also a way of thinking about what it means to be female in a very male-dominated environment and what that does to relationships among women—the incredible camaraderie and protectiveness and almost blurring of identities it inspires, and also the fractures that emerge. A plural voice can reveal that tension in that its we eventually gets pulled taut, almost to the breaking point. The reader senses it’s a kind of temporary enchantment. I found myself experimenting a lot with repetition. I wanted to get at the sense that there’s something cyclical at work here, a kind of uncanny recurrence. This sense that it’s the very thing that can’t enter into language that’s bound to keep happening, that it almost possesses those who can’t give it a name.

JMT: Were there other writers who influenced your decisions about style?

EG: Reading Claudia Rankine and Maggie Nelson and Roland Barthes really changed the way I thought about nonfiction. Coming out of the journalism world—where you tend to view language as something inert and functional—I thought for a long time that nonfiction was something I had no real interest in writing. But then I saw these writers doing really extraordinary things in the borderlands between prose and poetry, using the interiority and fluidity of the essay to look not just inward but outward, to create this dynamic exchange with the world. They were taking the same rigorous approach to issues as journalism but doing it in a way that pricked the reader into a kind of immediacy and intimacy and maybe even complicity with the subject matter, and in such a way that form was inseparable from substance. If we’re all to some extent captive to language and narratives not our own, then I think the only way to get at something new is through the language itself. There’s no way out but through.

JMT: You mix elements of horror and humor in a way that strikes me as very honest and true to life, at least in my very limited experience hearing from or about writers who have worked in somewhat similar situations. Any reflections about that specific choice?

EG: A lot of the writers I love mix darkness and humor in brilliant ways—Anne Enright, George Saunders, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Lucy Corin. I think part of that is just getting at the true texture of life, which is never ultimately any one thing but always this impossibly jumbled mess. If you get far enough into anyone’s psyche, there’s always horror and there’s always humor and often they exist side by side. There’s also something about inhabiting a dual or split consciousness that lends itself to humor, where you’re jumping around among multiple viewpoints at once—the assumed I (white and male, typically) and your own, for instance. So you can’t not be aware that as a woman you’re bringing a very different consciousness to the newsroom gallows humor about, say, an incident of gang rape, but you also know how to slip simultaneously into the de facto male consciousness. And something about that tension, that split, seems to give way to a comic undercurrent. I think there’s something about the experience of being unsettled, too, that’s related to humor and horror both—an inability to stand still and see something in any one way, the brain’s scramble to make connections between seemingly disparate things.

JMT: I wanted to be sure to ask you about an element of your essay I admire very much, its very short length. You capture an entire world in this brief space, but I wonder how many pages and drafts had to be left on the cutting-room floor? Hearing something more about your process would be illuminating.

EG: I tried initially to write a straightforward short story that drew on some of the same experiences, but I failed horribly every time. So certain lines had been rattling around my head for quite a while. Once I started to hear the voice, though, the essay actually came pretty quickly. But then I put it away for a long time—about a year and a half—before sending it out. I remember really loving the experience of writing it but also being very aware the whole time that it was this weird experiment that might actually be completely terrible—the sort of thing you write for yourself but never ever show to anyone else. So much of the essay, too, relies on sound and repetition, and I almost had to forget it, to get the rhythm of the lines out of my head, before I felt like I could make any sort of judgment about it.

Emily Geminder’s stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, American Short Fiction, Mississippi Review, Prairie Schooner, Witness, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Award and a fellowship award from the Vermont Studio Center.